Our family really enjoy getting together and celebrating Christmas. The fact that our celebrations are accident prone is not a problem, as the accidents are celebrated in later years after recovering from the present disaster.

Ah yes, we have Christmases like that - the most famous was the great pudding catastrophe of 2007 when my Grandfather warmed a little brandy, poured it over the pudding, lit it to make the pretty blue flame and then walked out into the living room with the pudding, tripped and fell into the Christmas Tree.

We saved the pudding, it was delicious. The tree was not so fortunate...

My mom made shepherd's pie (really cottage pie) when I was growing up and it's great comfort food to me now. However, if I try to make it from scratch instead of with Campbell's vegetarian vegetable soup and boxed mashed potatoes, it tastes wrong.

I'm a pretty decent cook and baker, but I remember one incident from a few years ago. I was making potato soup on the stovetop. It was a big batch, so I was using a tall stockpot. Everything was going along fine, I had it on low but with that stove low was not very low. It was gas, and it was difficult to get it low enough to just simmer but still keep the burner lit. Anyway, I tasted it and discovered the bottom had burned. The taste had gone through the whole batch and it couldn't be saved. I was probably most upset by the loss of all the delicious and not-cheap bacon and cream.

You cannot say that our family did not learn from the previous year's accident. However this had a cascade effect and things just keep trending downwards.

We gave up barbeque's at the river after the year the bank collapsed and the portable grill floated away with our food. It was cheese rolls for dinner

So the next year Dad built a permanent barbecue in the garden just in time for Christmas. Unfortunately he combined it with a waterfall and fountain for my mother's new ornamental fish pond. He finished it on Christmas Eve and did not have a chance to try it out. Unfortunately the wind blew the water from the fountain over the grill so it would not stay alight. Cheese rolls for dinner

Which led to the following year's great Turkey Debacle.

Microwaves were very new and they were hard to find in NZ. Dad was intrigued by them, and put forward the argument that with a microwave he could cook a big turkey roast dinner from scratch without making the house unbearably hot. We agreed but we should have known betterEarly on Christmas Morning, I got a panicked phone call from my mother (and she had nerves of steel) asking me to come around and help as she thought Dad had finally lost the plot. I could hear bangs and crashes in the background and Dad swearing loudly.

I rushed around to find my mother sitting outside. "Your father is in the kitchen". I gingerly stuck my head round the door to find Dad chasing a frozen turkey with an axe. It was much as I imagined ice hockey would be. He struck the turkey, the turkey flew off around the floor bounced off the cupboards and seemed to catch Dad's ankles on the rebound. It appears that Dad had read you could defrost and cook in a microwave just like that. What he hadn't taken into account was that the turkey was too large to fit into it. He had tried to cut it up with knives and a saw but the bird was solid. So now he was trying to chop it up with an axe.Once again cheese rolls for dinner

And so the years went by. There was the year that one of my SIL was confident she could manage a full roast dinner. The non-cooks retired to the garden for a family game of cricket. One of the grandchildren skyed the ball straight through the kitchen window. Guess what was underneath the window on the kitchen bench and was now covered in glass fragments. Yup the turkey. Cheese rolls for dinner again that year.

One of my brothers actually we suggested we cut out the accident and just plan to have cheese rolls. He was shouted down, after all we all had a unique family bond - we survived Christmas dinner.

When my parents moved out to the beach, we decided we would try a barbecue again. My mother researched proper gas barbeque's and marked out the big flash one she would buy. Unfortunately she had picked up a bug just before the holidays but Dad was totally confident he could manage. (Sound of ominous music) We turned up on Christmas day to find that instead of the big flash grill Mum had selected, Dad had bought instead a very cheap one from our equivalent of Walmart. It was an assemble yourself one and the instructions were not in a language know to anyone in our family. One of my brothers and Dad were arguing about what bit joined to which other bit, assisted by various grandchildren.

The rest of us were inside drinking sherry and eating cake. We could hear the debate outside "you light it" "No you light it". Eventually some one did. There was a loud bang, a grandchild came rushing in and grabbed a fire extinguisher and rushed out again. Another one came in and got the first aid box. My mother remarked she had some rather nice fish fingers and could do them with over chips. Made a change from cheese rolls.

And in case anyone is still reading and wondering why we did not go out to a hotel for a meal, well we did. The hotel had a power cut and a waitress spilt a full jug of Orange juice down my mother's back. We judged the accidents not up to our normal standard.

You cannot say that our family did not learn from the previous year's accident. However this had a cascade effect and things just keep trending downwards.

We gave up barbeque's at the river after the year the bank collapsed and the portable grill floated away with our food. It was cheese rolls for dinner

So the next year Dad built a permanent barbecue in the garden just in time for Christmas. Unfortunately he combined it with a waterfall and fountain for my mother's new ornamental fish pond. He finished it on Christmas Eve and did not have a chance to try it out. Unfortunately the wind blew the water from the fountain over the grill so it would not stay alight. Cheese rolls for dinner

Which led to the following year's great Turkey Debacle.

Microwaves were very new and they were hard to find in NZ. Dad was intrigued by them, and put forward the argument that with a microwave he could cook a big turkey roast dinner from scratch without making the house unbearably hot. We agreed but we should have known betterEarly on Christmas Morning, I got a panicked phone call from my mother (and she had nerves of steel) asking me to come around and help as she thought Dad had finally lost the plot. I could hear bangs and crashes in the background and Dad swearing loudly.

I rushed around to find my mother sitting outside. "Your father is in the kitchen". I gingerly stuck my head round the door to find Dad chasing a frozen turkey with an axe. It was much as I imagined ice hockey would be. He struck the turkey, the turkey flew off around the floor bounced off the cupboards and seemed to catch Dad's ankles on the rebound. It appears that Dad had read you could defrost and cook in a microwave just like that. What he hadn't taken into account was that the turkey was too large to fit into it. He had tried to cut it up with knives and a saw but the bird was solid. So now he was trying to chop it up with an axe.Once again cheese rolls for dinner

And so the years went by. There was the year that one of my SIL was confident she could manage a full roast dinner. The non-cooks retired to the garden for a family game of cricket. One of the grandchildren skyed the ball straight through the kitchen window. Guess what was underneath the window on the kitchen bench and was now covered in glass fragments. Yup the turkey. Cheese rolls for dinner again that year.

One of my brothers actually we suggested we cut out the accident and just plan to have cheese rolls. He was shouted down, after all we all had a unique family bond - we survived Christmas dinner.

When my parents moved out to the beach, we decided we would try a barbecue again. My mother researched proper gas barbeque's and marked out the big flash one she would buy. Unfortunately she had picked up a bug just before the holidays but Dad was totally confident he could manage. (Sound of ominous music) We turned up on Christmas day to find that instead of the big flash grill Mum had selected, Dad had bought instead a very cheap one from our equivalent of Walmart. It was an assemble yourself one and the instructions were not in a language know to anyone in our family. One of my brothers and Dad were arguing about what bit joined to which other bit, assisted by various grandchildren.

The rest of us were inside drinking sherry and eating cake. We could hear the debate outside "you light it" "No you light it". Eventually some one did. There was a loud bang, a grandchild came rushing in and grabbed a fire extinguisher and rushed out again. Another one came in and got the first aid box. My mother remarked she had some rather nice fish fingers and could do them with over chips. Made a change from cheese rolls.

And in case anyone is still reading and wondering why we did not go out to a hotel for a meal, well we did. The hotel had a power cut and a waitress spilt a full jug of Orange juice down my mother's back. We judged the accidents not up to our normal standard.

Bwah Ha ha ha ha!! My sides hurt!!

Very well written - you should write a book..'How to survive Christmas'

Tonight I decided to make hand-sized fried pies with apple filling. It has been around 10 years since I made fried pies, and my parents larder wasn't stocked the way that mine is. Apparently, when replacing Crisco with lard, I need to crank up the oil heat a bit more because those suckers soaked up the oil.

Daughter, age 7: "These are great! I give you a 100 for them."Me: "Thank you. Next time I'll make them a little different though, so they won't be so fatty."Daughter: "Fatty? Oh. I give you 50 for them."

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“A real desire to believe all the good you can of others and to make others as comfortable as you can will solve most of the problems.” CS Lewis

Did you know you can burn stuff in a crockpot? That's on low? With plenty of liquid? Because DH did. He turned honey chicken into charcoal. I'd cooked it before, and it turned out just fine. He followed my recipe. To the T. But instead of delicious honey chicken, we got charcoal. No, actually, we got chinese because we couldn't eat the charcoal.

And another time, DH sent me a picture of food on the grill. I asked if it was bacon. He said, no, it was hotdogs. Apparently he'd cooked them on high for more than 5 minutes. They were sad and shriveled by the time he pulled them off.

I didn't know that you could actually ignite brownies until I accidentally blew up a pan of them.

I had baked some brownies in a Pyrex dish, took them out of the oven, and set them on top of the (electric) stove top to cool. Later, while I was sitting in the living room, I heard a BOOM from the kitchen, and went to investigate.

Seems that the burner was turned on - low, but on. I don't remember fiddling with it, but my best guess is I bumped it or something, or it looked like it might be on, and in checking I turned it on? No clue. At any rate, the pan detonated and there was glass and brownie everywhere, and brownie in flames sitting right on the burner. Grabbed the fire extinguisher to put out the flames, and spent all that night (and a chunk of the next day) cleaning up the mess. Months later, when I moved, I was still finding extinguisher stuff in nooks and crannies - it made a far bigger mess than the glass and brownies!

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What part of v_e = \sqrt{\frac{2GM}{r}} don't you understand? It's only rocket science!

"The problem with re-examining your brilliant ideas is that more often than not, you discover they are the intellectual equivalent of saying, 'Hold my beer and watch this!'" - Cindy Couture

I love AmandaElizabeth's stories. I don't remember any major kitchen disasters from childhood because my parents were both pretty good cooks. But I do remember my oldest sister's husband just didn't come to the family with the "kitchen common sense" gene as my Dad referred to it.

He once went out to a gas grill, loaded it up with lighter fluid, turned on the gas and was a nano-second away from throwing a lit match in before Dad stopped him.

He decided to make pina coladas and my mom's blender was acting up. He put the blades directly on the blender and turned it on. We were all ducking from the flying blades.

He started cooking rice, decided he was making too much so put a few cups of halfway cooked rice down the sink and turned on lots of hot water. The plumber got a big laugh out of that one.

He tried cooking eggs in the shell in the microwave.

After 20 years in the family, he did turn out to be a pretty darn good cook, learning to make one of the best Prime Rib roasts I've ever tasted.